>With public projects there generally is no such accountability. Public projects use construction contracts just like private ones, they are just as accountabl

>With public projects there generally is no such accountability. Public projects use construction contracts just like private ones, they are just as accountable to their clients in this sense. The difference between property developers and politicians as clients is that developers can choose when, where and and what to build to optimise costs, whereas with public projects politicians are optimising for votes. Politicians very publicly decide to commit to a project based on an initial estimate and then order the civil service to procure it. Changes in specification that are big enough to significantly affect cost have to be approved by the political process which takes ages and is unpredictable. Different politicians get elected half way through the process and they will try to make last minute changes to designs and specifications. The later that changes are made to specifications the more they cost. If you make multiple late changes it causes massive confusion and it is extremely complicated and expensive to reconcile the redesign with all the existing information. Therefore this will cause cost overruns which can get out of control when the rushed integration of new features causes unanticipated consequences. Unfolding events affect public projects more. The Scottish parliament and Welsh assembly buildings both had last minute design changes to incorporate airport style security after 9/11. The Welsh assembly introduced a TV studio and broadcast lighting into the specification very late on. The Scottish parliament added a whole office block with offices to accommodate 130 MSPs and their staff. Of course those projects cost a lot more than the initial estimates given when they were first announced to the public, and the opposition politicians made as much political capital out of this as they could by comparing the original estimates to the final cost without mentioning the fact that a different thing was built than was specified at the beginning. You can be sure that the politicians that opposed the cost overruns in Wales enjoy showboating on TV though, and you can be sure that the Scottish MSPs all enjoy their lovely closed plan offices. Major privately financed projects can be just as bad though, believe me I have worked on a few. The key to a well run project is a quick and efficient decision making process. My theory is that because both the UK and the USA are effectively two party states they tend to suffer a lot more from a lack of a political consensus on whether it is a good idea to build something and how it is going to be done. This causes delays and inefficiencies because elections have much more potential to upset a project than in countries that govern by a coalition of consensus. Lastly, politicians will spend whatever they can get hold of if will get them votes and it's not coming out of local taxation or they can hide the capital expenditure in a different budget by using PFI procurement.